Category Archives: Quotable & Notes

“Why you should work out loud”

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This blog was never work-related in the sense that I was trying to promote or market myself. But it quickly evolved into a place that documented the work I was doing (back when I had a job). So this article by Allen Buchanan resonated with me. A few snippets:

don’t invent content. Document your work.

AI can help me create content. It cannot give me 42 years of experiences from which to draw.

The most compelling content generally comes from experience, not imagination.

create a digital record of your expertise.

For me, this is the money-quote:

And now, with artificial intelligence able to search, organize and repurpose that body of work, those years of accumulated knowledge become even more valuable.

If you’ve been following along, you’ve seen ever-more-frequent examples of this.

Thanks to Travis for the pointer.

Abundance

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It’s a word you hear a lot from proponents of AI. Yeah, some jobs will be eliminated but a bunch of new jobs will be created. And even if the new ones don’t pay as much, AI will usher in an age of abundance that will provide for much of what we need and want (and used to pay for). There are lots of acronyms but UBI seems to get tossed around a lot: Universal Basic Income. Somehow you’ll have all you need (shelter, food, entertainment, etc) and can spend your days in creative (recreational?) pursuits.

Sounds pretty good at first blush. But after watching the latest episode (Season 3, Episode 5) of Special Ops: Lioness, I’m not so sure. One of the characters is a college professor (who happens to be an agent of Chinese intelligence) lecturing an auditorium filled with students:

What is paramount to understand: AI will likely render what I do and what you aspire to do as obsolete.

Likewise to careers in marketing, accounting, engineering… whether software, biological, mechanical… data analysis, research management.

All of these careers will disappear in the next decade.

You must alter the focus of your education to include machine learning, computer vision and management strategies, NLP engineering, computer vision engineering.

And you must prepare yourselves for a world in which your endeavors are not compensated with money.

Your compensation is in the collective betterment of our society, of our state.

What, no money, you say? Yep, that’s the future.

Your efforts will be compensated through the services provided to you in return from the state… housing, health care, food, clean transportation, entertainment.

And as you prepare yourselves for a career in the future, you must prepare yourselves also for a world that replaces the imperialist goals and economic meddling of a “free–market society” with a dedication to a state that in turn dedicates itself to an equitable life for all humankind.

The episode was written by Taylor Sheridan, “an American screenwriter, director, showrunner, and former actor known for redefining the modern Western and neo-noir genres. After roles in Sons of Anarchy and Veronica Mars, he shifted to writing, earning acclaim for his “frontier trilogy” films: Sicario (2015), the Oscar-nominated Hell or High Water (2016), and Wind River (2017), which he also directed. His hit television catalog also includes Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Special Ops: Lioness, and Landman.” (Gemini)

“The Decline of Play”

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My childhood could only be described as idyllic. A small town in the ‘50s where we could walk to school (three blocks?) or ride our bikes across town to the city park for little league practice. We stayed out until nine p.m. playing hide-and-seek. No mobile phones, social media or video games. Play was something we did outside with other kids.

It was against this background that I read an article in The Atlantic titled What if It’s Not the Phone? “An evolutionary psychologist (Peter Gray) is challenging the popular understanding of kids and technology.” Gray laments “The Decline of Play”

Gray’s academic work defines play as a self-directed activity done only for its own sake. This, he came to believe, enables kids to figure out how to solve their own problems, nurture their own relationships, make their own rules, and manage their own disappointments. But he says that our society has spent the past 70 years or so interfering with that process. We’ve made it harder and harder for kids to do anything: They’re kept indoors for greater portions of the day and given less unstructured time; they play organized sports supervised by adults; they don’t go anywhere alone. Gray grew certain that this loss of independence has been harmful to their mental health.

Looking back, we (kids) took for granted our almost total freedom from adult supervision. It was wonderful.

Claude looks at Quotable & Notes

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The original tagline for this blog was “I need to start writing some of this down.” It started out as a place to save lines from movies, excerpts from books, someone’s interesting observation. The blog has been my repository for these. (~543 posts)

I uploaded them to Claude and asked for suggestions on analyzing these and it gave me several suggestions including:

Chronological drift — how your taste in what was worth writing down shifted over time:

Your quoting life shows a clean arc from media observer to philosopher. The blog started as a place to capture sharp observations about a world being disrupted by the internet. It became, over 24 years, primarily a philosophical notebook — with death showing up more insistently as the decades pass.

Coming up:

  • Pattern analysis — what authors, sources, or themes you quoted most across 24 years
  • Source mapping — movies vs. books vs. people vs. articles
  • Thematic clustering — philosophy, humor, politics, consciousness, etc.

“Do teens regret their social media use?”

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The blogger in me is surprised and delighted by #3.

“So how did social media regrets hold up? Out of 20 possible regrets, too much time on social media ranked 13th. The top regrets were 1.) not sticking up for oneself, 2.) being too self-conscious, 3.) not documenting memories, 4.) not learning practical life skills and 5.) not getting help with mental health. Girls were slightly more likely to regret time on social media than boys.”

— From a new study by Irish researcher Eoin Whelan